I am a WYTCH

I am a WYTCH

As I enter this space with you tonight…I am reminded of a song by Eartha Kitt called:

I want to be Evil

I've posed for pictures with Iv'ry Soap
I've petted stray dogs, and shied clear of dope
My smile is brilliant, my glance is tender
But I'm noted most for my unspoiled gender

I've been made Miss Reingold, though I never touch beer
And I'm the person to whom they say, "You're sweet, my dear, "
The only etchings I've seen have been behind glass
And the closest I've been to a bar is at ballet class

Prim and proper, the girl who's never been cased
I'm tired of being pure and not chased
Like something that seeks it's level
I want to go to the devil

This message resonates with not only with my personal journey, but also to the stereotypes of witch as evil or of the devil…so why in the world would I want to go there?

Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Garden writes about the will to create in black women’s lives as being linked to their will to survive because for centuries their voices and bodies had been suppressed, ignored, or forgotten like exquisite butterflies trapped in evil honey. I have always loved this metaphor because the wings of a butterfly are fragile and even the act of removing honey would destroy them. Honey as sweetness was also what I was as a girl growing up to be sweet and silent. I had experienced a lifetime of body shame trapped in a cult of virginity, my soul wanted to experience its badness. Denying my body was like erasing myself. I was the warrior, the temptress, and the sacred prostitute - wild and nurturing and I wanted to embrace all of it.

It’s been awhile since I stepped fully out of the broom closet. I don’t practice with a coven but as a solitary, eclectic, wytch and my life is the expression of my wytch-crafting art.

Sue Monk Kidd in Dance of the Dissident Daughters talks about the act of Whales breaching as a way they communicate with each other when seas gets rough …like an urgent and powerful ballet that allows the whales to follow one another’s vibrations. With each lunge, the whales mark their course, letting others know where they have been. I knew I needed to dive deep and resurface if I wanted to be whole. Strong women in history must have this whale’s instinct because women others, so we don’t get lost.

My Personal journey began growing up in Kaysville, Utah I had never known anyone with a college degree. I grew up being taught Women’s highest potential was motherhood and any education should be directed at that goal. But I was a curious little girl and the larger world puzzled me. I was constantly asking questions that no one seemed to have answers for.

Obeying my prescribed role. I married at 18. He was 13 years older than me and had finished a college degree and a religious mission. I thought he was the most intelligent man I had ever met. If I had a question, I simply had to ask him. It never occurred to me that I could know things for myself. I wanted to go to school, but it was so hard with all the duties of being a wife and mother, so initially I would look up classes in the catalogs of colleges, buy the textbooks and read on my own. This required a dictionary since I had to look up what seemed like every other word. I would write the definitions in the margins as well my questions. I would re-read passages stopping to mine the thoughts until I understood.

Semester build on semester as I progressed through a 35 year educational journey. I was still very active in my religion, which took up an enormous amount of time so I was never went to school more than two days a week. Those precious moments on a college campus were like gold. I could spend hours in the library and read as much as I wanted to. I could eat lunch alone and no one would bother me. At home, I couldn’t open a book until after 10 PM after my children were asleep and my husband satisfied. I remember doing dishes late at night with an open book propped behind the sink so I could read as I worked. Eventually I received a Bachelor’s Degree in Art, a Master’s Degree in Design, and a Doctoral Degree in Educational Anthropology. I actually saw myself as a home economics teacher, but instead was offered a job teaching Women’s studies.  

I remember my first class. I was teaching Introduction to Women’s Lives and a few days into the semester Sept. 11, 2001 happened. I will always remember that morning. I was getting ready for work with all the self-doubts of why was I teaching feminism. I had heard the warnings in church about dissident women and what happens to them, but here I was facing my first women’s studies class ever– not as a student, but as a professor. I sat that morning of 9/11 and watched the first plane hit the tower. I along with other was still trying to make sense of what appeared to be a terrible accident when the second plane hit. I was griped with fear and glued to the TV. It was apocalyptic. I remember the feeling that this was a sign of my condemnation. Why was I doing this? Why couldn’t I just walk away and say no.

Something was pulling me forward through a fog of self-doubt. My two worlds became utterly irreconcilable. Feminists had a raw hunger for truth and a willingness to stand in the fire for it, but were also very scary. I had never seen such peeling back of how the world really works and for whom and under what conditions. I kept my work a secret as I tried to hold allegiance to both systems of thought. What I didn’t know then was that I was headed to a showdown of authority in which my only choice was to submit and stay or rebel and walk away from the faith that had framed my entire life.

Years later…A broken marriage, estranged family, lost income, and banishment shattered my life. I knew I was in a huge death cycle. I let all my possessions go. This is when the moon became my constant companion, as I would find refuge in the sweet darkness of walking under her light. I wanted an alter for my awakening, but didn’t know what to do. So I bought a case with lots of empty baskets. The baskets were my only furniture. When others would visit of course they would ask I would smile and say, “That’s my altar - because I’m just a ‘basket case’. My Wytch was born out of those empty baskets. I had lost the protective shell that said I was above the corruption of the world. This was the first time I remember feeling a real anger instead of a desire to be good. My grief turned to a healing anger that became the fuel for deep questioning as I embraced nature’s cycles and trusted my own answers.

         The paradox was that my fundamentalist beginning made me a wiser, more powerful Wytch by propelling my quiet questioning into education. I studied all the taboo subjects that I was told to stay away from...anthropology...critical theory...sociology...war...gender...history...mythology, and religion. I couldn't get enough. My exit out of fundamentalism led me straight into my feminist awakening that wouldn’t allow me to stay silent when I saw the abuses of history...be they religious, institutional, or political...I wanted to know myself in this story in a more communal way because as a wytch, I knew if I didn’t fight back, I would burn. Even though I didn’t want to join a coven, I had a desire for a personal initiation. Like Persephone’s decent into hell I wanted it to be real, I wanted to experience fear, surrender, death, and rebirth. I wanted it to be public and meaningful. I wanted it to be an extension of my feminist spiritual activism as a wytch.

The college newspaper caught it all and I became the front-page story. The headline read… Professor Swearingen arrested on November 11, 2011 for ‘failure to disperse’ exercising her free speech rights of assembly in defiance of city codes targeting homeless people.

That is the public story, but the personal story goes much deeper. My arrest was not only my surrender, but also my public invocation as I stood in circle with others and said:

Reweaving community and democracy is an act alive in the sacredness of earth. We are about occupying our spaces of life, about healing, about preserving the commons. Each of our cultural tales and traditions are important. We all have ancestral spirits whose teachings live within us. We all have stories and legends that act shape our lives. We are to dance and chant and hold sacred space. The looting of culture, people, families, and futures is the core of unholy. We live in a society that has glorified the product over the person, the production over the art, and profit over sharing. Moving from a culture of me to a culture of we – inclusive, interracial, and humanist – we must develop an ethics and politics that protects the earth and the cultures that serve to enhance life on our planet.

My arrest was intentional bridgework to hold space and be present with the suffering of others. Using my body for social resistance was also a profoundly dangerous act, not a ritual in ceremonial safe places but…spaces, a few feet…borders like invisible bars that keep our society so segregated. I knew I had been the stranger, a sojourner in another reality. I knew my incarceration would be temporary. I didn’t need to learn street skills for my own survival. I was privileged by an unjust system that over-determined the very life choices, visions and opportunities of the women I shared a cell with. I had paid attention to the soul of place. I realized that if my spirituality, as wytch, was not aimed at the soul of the world, I would simply dwell in a romanticized Hollywood version of witchcraft. I gained a deep alchemical change that night.  I knew I would never be the same, and would never again enjoy the illusion of distance from those marginalized. As I was being released, one of the women arrested for prostitution looked at me and said,

“I get it, you are fighting for poor women like me! Well give it to me sista and hallelujah”. Then she said something that broke my heart, “Do you think I am a bad…a bad woman?” 

At that moment, I experienced what I can only describe as hearing the cries of all witches burned by history.

Closing Thoughts

Yes, I am a wytch. There’s power is simply saying it. For me being a wytch is about being a holy heretic to any institution that seeks to exploit, marginalize, or oppress. My acts of holy defiance stand up, speak out, and hold communal spaces for healing…I stand in the fire for all the wytches of history burned and reclaim the reverence of wytch…

Sometimes you have to just put on the hat and remind everyone whom they are dealing with…

So yes I’m a WYTCH! And I’ll spell it any damn way I want.